Flipkart looks to get 10,000 new sellers on board for festive season

The company has already received interest from around 1,000 sellers who wants to be a part of this initiative and Maheshwari expects the number to go up to 10,000 in the next three months.Varun Jain | ETRetail | September 30, 2015, 17:34 IST

FILE: The company has already received interest from around 1,000 sellers who wants to be a part of this initiative and Maheshwari expects the number to go up to 10,000 in the next three months. (Photo credit: Getty Images)New Delhi: Flipkart expects 10,000 new sellers to join its ecommerce platform this festive season through its recently launched 'Turbo Charge' programme that offers a range of services and a 30-day trial period to establish their online presence, a top official of the company said.

Under this initiative, the country's largest ecommerce marketplace offers services such as cataloguing and listing support, operations and account management support, ad credits, and end-to-end services from its ecosystem partners or full service agencies (FSAs), worth over Rs 10,000 for free.

"Primarily the idea is to get sellers quickly onboard our platform and also give them various ecosystem services, so that they can quickly start selling and also start growing on the platform," said Manish Maheshwari, head and vice president, seller ecosystem, at Flipkart. "With the help of this programme we can cut down the average seller onboarding process to less than a week from the current 2-3 weeks," he said.

The move will help Flipkart increase offerings on its platform during the Diwali season and its Big Billion Day sale to be held from October 13-17. "We want to have as much selection on our platform and provide best service level to our customers," Maheshwari said.

Under Turbo Charge, Flipkart's FSA partners will help its sellers plan their business growth in a much efficient way by constantly advising them on the nuances of the business. They will also manage the complete online sales of the sellers to encourage sellers to try out new things without much hassle. The FSAs include Browntape, ChikiWeb, Onio, 99 yrs, Blubox and Seller Worx.

"One of our goal is to spur entrepreneurship in the country by enabling anyone to start selling online and start earning a livelihood. And we have realised that as many people want to sell online, they need help and support. A lot of sellers in small towns are very new to ecommerce. They take time to understand the nuances of understanding the online business," said Maheshwari.

The company has already received interest from around 1,000 sellers who wants to be a part of this initiative and Maheshwari expects the number to go up to 10,000 in the next three months.

Flipkart will also use this campaign to encourage existing sellers who are lagging behind to streamline their back-end processes.

At present, Flipkart has around 40,000 active sellers on its platform. It hopes to increase this number to one lakh by the end of this financial year. It also plans to increase the number of FSAs to about 100 in the next few months from 20 now, Maheshwari said.

Its rivals Snapdeal and Paytm, too, are aggressively wooing sellers to come on board. While Snapdeal targets to increase the number of merchants on its platform to 10 lakh in three years from 1.5 lakh now, Alibaba-backed Paytm is keen to have close to one lakh sellers on its marketplace by the end of this year.

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